US' academic McCarthyism self-harming

The United States became the world's scientific superpower primarily by attracting foreign brains, encouraging intellectual curiosity and allowing ideas to cross borders. Now, in the name of protecting that supremacy, Washington is erecting barriers against all three. It is an odd way to win a technological race: making your own scientists run with their shoelaces tied together.

On Oct 19, the Pentagon announced that 30 US universities had fully terminated research partnerships with institutions on its Section 1286 list. The announcement followed a directive in August requiring the universities to review their foreign research relationships or risk losing federal funding. The latest list contains 130 institutions, including 88 ones in China. What Washington celebrates as a victory for "research security" looks increasingly like academic McCarthyism.

Protecting genuinely sensitive military technology is a legitimate responsibility of any government. But treating institutional affiliation as evidence of wrongdoing is something else. The blacklist encompasses not merely defense-related establishments but leading universities and research institutes working on semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology and materials science. These are precisely the fields in which international collaboration can produce breakthroughs benefiting humanity.

Washington's approach substitutes geography for evidence and suspicion for scientific judgment. Rather than scrutinizing individual projects, it pressures universities to abandon entire institutional relationships. The result is not necessarily greater security, but less science.

US universities understand the difference. Academic associations, faculty organizations and individual institutions have challenged the sweeping restrictions, questioning their legal foundations, proportionality and consequences for academic freedom. Some universities have sought to preserve educational partnerships involving no sensitive research. Such resistance hardly suggests enthusiastic academic consent. Compliance secured through threats to funding should not be mistaken for conviction.

The chilling effect is already measurable. A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, surveying 1,304 Chinese-origin researchers in the United States, found that 72 percent felt unsafe and 61 percent had considered leaving. Research suggests that departures accelerated after the US Department of Justice launched its ill-fated China Initiative, initiated by the US administration in 2018 to identify "Chinese spies" in US universities, leading to racial profiling.

Although formally discontinued in 2022 by the Joe Biden administration, its legacy of suspicion persists.

This is an extraordinary reversal. For decades the US imported talent while exporting discoveries. Increasingly, it risks exporting talent while importing insecurity. Scientists who remain may avoid international collaborations, controversial subjects or promising research simply because the political consequences seem unpredictable.

China's Ministry of Commerce has rightly identified the contradiction. By overstretching "national security" and weaponizing scientific cooperation, Washington is coercing universities into choosing sides. The policy threatens the US' own innovation while damaging legitimate Chinese interests. Beijing has grounds to defend its institutions against discriminatory restrictions.

The timing makes the policy particularly perverse. China and the US renewed their bilateral science-and-technology agreement in December 2024, preserving a limited framework for basic research. More recently, both governments have invested considerable diplomatic effort in stabilizing relations. The August directive moves against that momentum.

It also threatens to hollow out people-to-people exchanges. Young scientists, engineers and researchers should be among the most valuable participants in bilateral engagement, not its first casualties. Excluding them would impoverish both countries' future intellectual networks.

Scientific competition between China and the US should not become a zero-sum game. Climate change, pandemics and fundamental discoveries do not respect geopolitical boundaries.

The US' greatest competitive advantage was never its ability to keep foreign talent out. It was its capacity to bring the world's best minds together. A country that forgets this may discover that its most effective technological rival is not China, but its own Cold War mentality and ideological prejudice.